


Outside Looking In

by Jenwryn



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Challenge Response, Community: grangerblack100, Established Relationship, F/M, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-09-07
Updated: 2008-09-07
Packaged: 2017-10-02 13:04:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jenwryn/pseuds/Jenwryn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hermione's travelling across continental Europe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Outside Looking In

Hermione stops reading and lets her book, a railway station paperback, rest against her thighs. She’s tired, and they’ve been travelling since Tuesday, and the clutter of the carriage is making her head hurt. A mess of battered suitcases and overstuffed backpacks spills out into the aisle, despite the way the ticket-collector frowns every time she has to push her way through them to do a head-count after each stop – whenever she arrives, people pull their luggage tightly beneath their feet as though to say, really, we’re not inconveniencing anyone but ourselves and, actually, we don’t mind sitting like monkeys with our knees to our chins, not at all. Of course, the moment the woman’s broad back passes through the slowly sliding doors, the bags return to the aisle. Somebody – Hermione suspects the old man with the crooked hat – has a radio running a little too loudly for comfort, its disembodied voice, in a foreign language, screaming out what can only be a football match – and there’s a child fussing grumpily, two seats away, because her ignorant mother packed the wrong coloured pencils.

To her right, so much closer, Hermione can hear the soft thud of music from Sirius’s iPod – or, at least, she can hear the drumming bass of it, despite how often she’s told him he’ll ruin his hearing, since she gave it to him at Christmas. She reaches out, and rests her hand on his knee, feeling the comfort of his jeans beneath her palm. It’s strange to be out here, in this world, part of something that she long ago renounced. It was Sirius’s idea, of course, to travel this way, and the train speeds smoothly through the long swathes of golden grain and canola fields, racing them eastwards to the capital. There’s a magically-modified motorcycle waiting for them there, and then they’ll head even further east, into countries whose names Hermione still confuses after all these years.

But for now, she travels like the woman she might have become, had it not been for some split gene, or slipped generation, or whatever it was that bestowed magic upon her. The woman she might have been, caught up in this life of railway paperbacks and rattling technology. And she looks around, and realises that she feels like a voyeur, gazing from the outside in at something so fundamentally similar, and yet so intrinsically different… watching Muggles. For the first time in her life – how has it taken her this long? – she realises that she will never be one. _Has _never been one, despite what she presumed as a child.

Sirius’s hand meets hers at his knee, warm and rough, squeezing her fingers gently, but firm.

For a moment their eyes meet.

And then Hermione Black returns to the story of her paperback, to read of spaceships and star battles – the magic of this world she gave up.


End file.
